Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar is the cofounder of Brent Ozar Unlimited, a Microsoft MVP, and one of the few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server 2008. He specializes in making SQL Server run faster by knowing more about its environment - hardware, networking, virtualization, and storage. He loves helping the community through his blog, answering questions as @BrentO on Twitter, and teaching others how to blog, write, and present at BrentOzar.com.

Brent got his start in the hospitality industry. He worked his way up from hotel desk clerk to budget analyst and internal auditor, then moved into the technology side of the business. He covered the entire vertical market doing everything from making beds to evaluating P&L statements. Brent's hotel experience taught him that training is everyone's job - he constantly had to train a never-ending churn of employees who moved up through the business, and he took pride in seeing people succeed. In 1999, he joined a hospitality technology vendor as a programmer, and he built hotel payroll, budget, and survey solutions. When he had to migrate the back end to SQL Server 7.0, he found his calling, and he's been working with databases ever since.

In 2005-2008, he managed the SQL Server databases for Southern Wine & Spirits, a $7b distribution company. When the Storage Area Network (SAN) administrator left, he volunteered to take over those duties because he wanted to know how to make his SQL Servers run faster. When the company's virtualization environment wasn't performing, he stepped in there too, expanding his horizons to improve his database administration. Brent joined Quest Software in 2008 as a SQL Server Expert, where he leveraged his technology curiosity and his love for training to present at SQL Server events around the world.

In 2010, Brent decided to focus on consulting and training full time. When he's not making databases faster, more reliable, and more secure, he continues to learn about what's coming next. He loves diving into technologies like storage, virtualization, and cloud services to see how they will impact database administration over the coming years.

Brent enjoys travel, food, wine, and laughing, and probably spends entirely too much time doing all of those.